"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event-related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne
Though this is related to Jerry’s 5th reason, I think it’s worth being explicit about the effect of a job on your mental, physical, or spiritual being. Many years ago I took on a client where every interaction was unpleasant. The owner argued with me about my recommendations, groused about my bills, and repeatedly implemented something different from what I had proposed and complained about the results. It took me a while, but one day I sat down and wrote him a letter that said I was unable to work for him anymore. It was the right decision, it felt good, and since then I’ve been better able to disengage in a timely fashion from work that isn’t working for me.
Sometimes you have no choice but to continue with a job you’d leave if circumstances were different. Sometimes you run up against one of the above reasons to leave a job, and you have no choice. But when you have a choice, don’t overlook your own needs because of a commendable but perhaps now misguided loyalty to the commitment you made when you began.
Some stories have a dark side. Hans Bleiker tells a story about a group of scientists who spent several years carefully researching how to maintain the health of a deer herd. They determined that some minor changes in state hunting regulations would be very effective. At a public hearing, their entire case was undermined in 15 minutes by the testimony of a guy who loudly protested that his great-grandfather had helped his father shoot his first deer, his father had gone with him to shoot his first deer, and he’d be damned if some bunch of scientists were going to stop him help his son to shoot his first deer.
It’s been hard to miss the deluge of books and articles pointing out (correctly) that presenters who tell relevant, well-told stories have far more impact on listeners than those who recite a litany of facts. It’s not surprising that the most popular and highly paid professional speakers are those with a vivid story to tell — one that often follows some variant of the hero’s journey
Stories have great power to change our minds. They can do wonderful things. Challenge our ingrained beliefs. Make us aware of injustice. Inspire us to be better human beings, and motivate us to act for the greater good.
Unfortunately, some use such power for evil. People can use stories to inflict great damage.
Stories are dangerous, because, even with good intentions, stories can be wrong. And, more dangerously, they can be purposefully misleading. A child’s default belief is that the stories they hear are true. We tend to carry that belief into adulthood despite increasing experience that stories can be seriously biased and deceptive. Sadly, it has now become routine for authority figures to publicly lie to achieve their objectives. This is leading to a world where “alternative facts” are becoming the norm.
Some stories have a dark side
Event planners often select and support presenters who get a platform to tell their stories to an audience. While acknowledging the power of stories, let’s not forget that they can evoke dark passions in those who hear them. As people who make events happen, we bear a responsibility to decide whether we want to tacitly support those storytellers among us who use stories for immoral and unethical ends.
I’ve been an active and satisfied PayPal user for 24years and [crosses fingers] have not yet had any problems with the service. But I just experienced a PayPal refund gotcha that could have easily overdrawn my PayPal-tied bank account. Luckily, I had a large enough balance at the time. No harm resulted, but I’m sharing what happened and how you can prevent the same thing from happening to you.
A client had paid for his spot in one of my upcoming workshops, but needed to cancel shortly afterwards. He had paid me 900 euros so I issued him a full PayPal refund from my euro balance. (Yes, PayPal accounts can work with multiple currencies, which is convenient when you are providing services internationally and your clients want to pay in local currencies.)
When you issue a full refund in PayPal, the company refunds your full variable transaction fee, but not the fixed portion of the fee. For transactions in the US, that’s a mere $0.30. For refunds on international transactions, it’s higher due to currency conversion issues. But the gotcha I’m about to share is not restricted to international transactions; it can occur for any kind of refund.
The gotcha
Here’s the gotcha. My euro PayPal balance wasn’t quite large enough to cover the refund. I assumed that PayPal would zero out my euro balance and then take their small fixed fee out of my US dollar balance or my bank account.
Wrong! A few days later I scanned my online bank statement and discovered that PayPal had taken the entire refund out of my bank account, which now had a thousand dollars less in it than I’d thought! The euro balance was untouched.
Why did this happen? Here’s a PayPal FAQ on refunds with the crucial paragraph outlined:
{If you can’t read this, it says “If your PayPal account balance does not have enough money in it, the entire refund will be issued from the primary bank account linked to your PayPal account“ — here’s a link to the FAQ How do I issue a full or partial refund?}
Before I found this FAQ, I thought PayPal had made a mistake. I opened a case at the Resolution Center, which, to make a long story short, was a complete waste of time. So I called PayPal (888-221-1161), something I’d never done before. It took about 25 minutes on hold, which is apparently not unusual, but the service rep I eventually spoke to explained what had happened and, unexpectedly, said she would issue a refund to make up the difference in the currency loss I would incur in turning my euros back into dollars. Sure enough, a ~$50 credit quickly appeared in my account once I’d zeroed out my euro balance — good service!
Prevent this PayPal gotcha
So how can you prevent this PayPal refund gotcha from happening to you? Simply, before making a refund ensure that your PayPal balance is large enough to completely cover it! This may require you to add a relatively small amount to the balance to cover the non-refundable fixed fee. Do this and you’ll avoid the possible financial consequences of an unexpectedly overdrawn bank account.
Hope this helps some folks. I’ve heard plenty of angry stories about PayPal over the years but have been fortunate to have none of my own. Feel free to share your own experience in the comments below.
How can we build connection and engagement with the people with whom we work?
My wise consultant friend Naomi Karten tells a short story about a client’s unexpected reaction. Frank had a bad experience with an earlier information technology project, so Naomi’s team gave him three possible approaches to a major system design and a list of the pluses and minuses of each.
“The plan was to let him select the approach he preferred in hopes that he’d gain more trust in us as a result…”
“…Frank jumped up, shouted, ‘How dare you develop options without my input!’ and marched out of the room…”
“…Instead of his seeing the options as giving him a say in our efforts, he may have seen us as preventing his input into the very idea of options. We saw ourselves giving him some control. He may have seen us as taking it away.” —Naomi Karten, The Importance of Giving Others a Sense of Control
At traditional conferences, attendees choose from predetermined sets of sessions chosen by conference organizers. Think about your experience of such events. Have you found that much of the time, none of the choices supply what you actually need and/or want? Sadly, we’re so used to this state of affairs, we accept it as normal.
An alternative
Conferences don’t have to be designed this way. Over the last twenty-five years, I’ve discovered that peer conferences, where participants determine the choices, provide a much better fit between the wants/needs of the attendees and the conference program they construct on-the-fly. This leads to significantly greater connection, engagement, and satisfaction.
Sometimes, giving people a limited number of options is not enough. Giving up control over the choices at your conferences by handing them over to the participants — using a proven process, of course —is one of the best ways to build trust, connection, and engagement at your events.
Friends don’t let friends give away their original content to third-party platforms
I’ve been saying this for years, but do people listen? No, they don’t. Don’t give away control of your content.
Let me be clear. By all means share your content for free on any of the gazillion social media platforms available. And if you can get paid appropriately for creating content for others, good for you. Otherwise, make sure that your content remains under your control. Don’t give away control of your content.
Why? Well, here are a few reminders:
Geocities was once the third most visited site on the internet. 38 million user-built pages! Nothing but a distant memory now, unless you live in Japan.
Remember when your friends saw everything you posted on Facebook? Not anymore, unless you pay up.
Ah, those glorious days when you posted something in a LinkedIn group and a significant number of people would read it! Long gone.
Now the blog host site Medium has announced a layoff of a third of its staff. There are millions of posts on the site. Will Evan Williams pull the plug? Will social journalism survive? Who knows?
Get the picture? Posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Don’t do it!
Though this route involves more work and/or money than posting on a third-party platform, you:
Control your own content. You can add, edit, delete, and control comments on it at any time.
Determine how your content is presented. Want to insert an offer for your services or products in the middle of a blog post? No problem.
Retain full rights to your content. (One example: the rights to anything you post to Huffington Post belongs to them. And they don’t even pay you for the privilege of writing for them!)
Build your own brand, authority, and SEO, not that of a third-party site.
Maintain access to your content. If your web hosting service goes bankrupt or is unsatisfactory, you can transfer your content to a new host. As long as the internet is up and you pay for your hosting service, your content will be available.
16 years ago, I started the Conferences That Work website you’re reading. As expected, hardly anyone visited initially. As I steadily added content (at least once per week), viewership grew. Today, this site is the world’s most popular website on meeting design and related issues.
As a result, my website is now the largest source of client inquiries for my consulting and facilitating services — something I would never have predicted when it went live in 2009. The ever-growing body of articles on this blog and the inbound links to them continue to build my brand, authority, and SEO.
Take a moment to consider meetings in a wider context—OK, a very wide context. I’m going to try to convince you that meetings are more important than you think.
“Who am I?” We’ve all wondered about some form of this question. While the answer is left for an exercise for the reader (and this writer), Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and a pioneer in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, argues that our identity is not contained so much within us, but between us.
As Dan puts it:
“The self has been falsely characterized as being embedded in your body … The self being embedded in your body is not only wrong, it is a destructive belief … We have an internal-self of a ‘me’, and we do have an interconnected-self of a ‘we’. Both are important.” —Dr. Daniel Siegel, “Why Compassion is Necessary for Humanity“
Here’s the two-minute conclusion of Dan’s video:
While our primary relationships are usually with family and friends, professional relationships are also important, and meetings are typically the most effective way to form and develop them.
If then — as interpersonal neurobiology would have it — we are ultimately who we are because of our relationships, it follows that meetings are central to our being, our understanding of ourselves.
Replace “brain training” hype with something that works!
Driving home from the post office today, I finally heard one too many promotions for Lumosity brain training on my local NPR station. Lumosity, in case you somehow haven’t heard, is a subscription to online games that claim to improve memory, attention, cognitive flexibility, speed of processing, problem-solving, and, for all I know, world peace too.
Despite the Federal Trade Commission slapping Lumosity’s creator, Lumos Labs, with a $50 million judgment (reduced to a $2 million fine) in January to settle charges of deceptive advertising that claimed — with no “competent and reliable scientific evidence” — that the games could help users achieve their “full potential in every aspect of life”, the company continues to bombard consumers with ads. Meanwhile, research on the efficacy of such programs has found little or no evidence that they make any difference to global measures of intelligence or cognition.
“I think claims these companies have been making — and Lumosity is not alone — have been grossly exaggerated. They’re trying to argue that we’re going to take you out of [the] active world … that we’re going to put you in a room alone in front of a computer screen and you’ll play a game that will make you smarter.” “There is no compelling evidence for that.” —Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity
At best, it turns out, these games somewhat improve the ability of players to … wait for it … play the games.
A simple suggestion
This leads to a simple suggestion. Replace “brain training” hype with something that works!
Don’t pay for programs that claim to “train your brain”. Instead, figure out what you want to do that actively engages your mind — and do it!
You’ll probably learn a thing or two about something that actually interests you. And, though I can’t guarantee that your mind will become healthier, your bank account definitely will be!
Illustration components from Flickr users isaacmao and gambort
I spent the summer of 1973 working for the Long-Range Studies Department of the British Post Office, a long-defunct group that attempted to predict the exciting future that new technologies would surely bring about. The Post Office had just built a few hideously expensive teleconferencing studios, connected by outrageously expensive telephone trunk lines. One of our jobs was to find out how to best use them. Could we persuade businesspeople to stop traveling to meetings, to sit instead in comfortable local studios hundreds of miles apart, handsomely equipped with cameras, microphones, screens, and speakers that magically allowed them to meet as well as if they were all in the same room? Why yes, we concluded brightly in our final report:
“A substantial number of business meetings which now occur face-to-face could be conducted effectively by some kind of group telemedia.”
Online meetings today
Forty years later, “group telemedia”, now known as online or virtual meetings, are common and increasingly popular. Solomon’s New York Times article quoted above explores how some corporate shareholder meetings are now held online. The biggest advantages of online meetings are clearly convenience and much lower costs: no travel, venue, or F&B expenditures.
There are, however, some downsides.
Shareholder meetings
Solomon points out that virtual shareholder meetings typically pre-empt meaningful shareholder interaction; convenient if management is facing awkward questions.
“It was no coincidence that the CSX Corporation held its 2008 meeting at a remote rail yard in New Orleans, the same year it was the focus of a shareholder activist putting up a proxy fight. In previous years, it had held those meetings at the luxurious Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, which the railroad owned at the time. A virtual meeting eliminates the potential for a public relations disaster.”
He contrasts such approaches with what some companies do:
“Think about the extravaganza that is the Berkshire Hathaway meeting. Days of talking and showing off the company’s products, including copious amounts of treats from Dairy Queen, a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary. The Walt Disney Company’s meeting is also known for highlighting the company’s latest movie or ride. Even children can ask questions; one recent interaction led Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, to give a private tour of Pixar to a child. Some companies are local legends where the entire town will gather. It is at these meetings that connections are made between the company and its shareholders.“
Solomon concludes:
“By forcing everything onto the web, we lose the personal interaction. Everyone logs in and watches a preprogrammed set of questions and answers. And then everyone goes away. Management’s worldview is reaffirmed in the 10 or so minutes it allows for questioning, and there is no engagement except with those investors who own a portion of shares large enough to personally meet with management. It’s a modern world that is frightening in its disengagement.”
Online versus face-to-face
Virtual meetings lower costs. They offer a convenient way to receive content and they can provide limited interactivity. Yet you can also abandon one with the click of a mouse. Such meetings require little commitment, so it is harder to successfully engage participants when the cost of leaving is so low.
If you think of a meeting primarily as a way of transferring content, then online meetings seem attractive, inexpensive alternatives to face-to-face events. If, however, you value meetings as opportunities to make meaningful connections with others, face-to-face meetings offer significant advantages.
Yes, virtual meetings lower costs. Yet I believe that the unique benefits of face-to-face meetings are still valuable. Think of the advantages of being physically present with other people: dining and socializing together, the serendipity of human contact, the opportunity to meet new people in person rather than hear a voice on the phone or see an image on a screen, the magic that can occur when a group of people coalesces. All these combine into more than the sum of their parts, building the potential to gain and grow long-term relationships and friendships. Anyone who has been to a good face-to-face conference knows that these things can happen. Either in the moment or in retrospect, participants may see them as pivotal times in their lives.
“The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide a simple way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and complied with.” —Brown Out, snopes.com
If the group arrived at a venue and discovered brown M&Ms present, they knew they needed to immediately check all contract stipulations — including important matters like whether the stage could actually handle the massive weight of the band’s equipment. Apparently, David Lee Roth would also trash the band’s dressing room to drive home the point.
My experience with presenter contracts
Over the years, I’ve contracted with hundreds of organizations for meeting facilitation and design consulting, and I’m starting to wonder if I should adopt Van Halen’s approach.
For example, I have arrived at presentation venues to find, despite a written contract agreement to the contrary:
The room is full of furniture that prevents participants from moving around. “We didn’t realize it was important, and we need this room set for the session after yours.”
I can’t post materials on the walls. “Can’t you use some tables instead?”
The requested audio equipment isn’t available. “We couldn’t get you a Countryman/lav, but here’s a hand mike.”
The unobstructed, free space is far smaller than what I requested or was told. “We needed a stage for the afternoon keynote.“/ “We decided to hold the buffet in the room.”
Ballpoint pens replaced fine-point Sharpies. “Oh, I see, yes, I guess no one will be able to read all the participant Post-Its at a distance. We’ll just have to make do.”
Projector resolution is not what I was told or requested. “Your slides will be a bit distorted, but I’m sure people will still be able to read them.”
Tables that were supposed to be covered with taped-down white paper for participant drawings are still bare. “Kevin said he’d cover them, but we don’t know where he is. Surely it won’t take long; can you help us?”
Carefully diagrammed room sets have been replaced with something different. “Well, our staff have never set up curved theater seating before — it’s not on their standard charts — so they set the rows straight.”
Why it’s necessary to read and follow contracts
It’s true that I’m not the standard-presenter-talking-from-a-podium-at-the-front-of-the-room — i.e., “Give me a room full of chairs and my PowerPoint and I’m all set!” Yet there are sound reasons for my, apparently to some, strange-seeming requests. Those contract provisions are not about making my life easier or more luxurious — I need them to provide participants with the best possible learning, connection, and overall experience during my time with them.
I am well aware of the incredible demands made on meeting planners before and during events. I’ve had that role for hundreds of events, and know what it’s like. Things rarely go according to plan, and we need to invent creative solutions on the spot. No matter what happens, I always work with planners to the best of my ability to ensure that the show goes on and it’s the best that it can be under the circumstances.
What’s frustrating is that we can almost always avoid complications like the examples above with a modicum of planning — if meeting planners read and take seriously the terms of presenter contracts to which they’ve agreed. I will bend over backward to resolve pre-event concerns, but being hit with last-minute surprises is, at best, annoying and, at worst, can significantly reduce the effectiveness of what I have been paid and contracted to do.
Read contracts!
No, I’m not going to start trashing dressing rooms like David Lee Roth. (Full disclosure: nobody’s ever even offered me a dressing room.) But, folks, if you hire me, don’t spoil the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar. Please read my presenter contracts before signing. Ask me about anything you don’t understand or concern you so we’re clear about my needs and your ability to fulfill them. Take my requests seriously, and as the event approaches, keep in mind your commitments so you don’t overlook them.
I will appreciate your professionalism and everyone — your attendees, you, and I — will reap the benefits.
When the renowned cellist Pablo Casals was asked why, at 81, he continued to practice four or five hours a day he answered: “Because I think I am making progress.” Here are my three prerequisites for lifelong learning.
Like Casals, I want to keep living lifelong learning by:
As an example, here’s what I recently learned while leading a workshop.
Trying new things and noticing what happens
During the workshop:
I used a projected countdown timer and a 90-second piece of music to get participants back in their seats on time at the end of a short mid-workshop break. Outcome? It worked really well!
While facilitating body voting (aka human spectrograms) I verbally stated each question we were exploring. Outcome? It seemed like a few participants didn’t hear or understand what I’d said until I repeated myself. Verbal communication didn’t work so well.
I wore a red hat when I was explaining/debriefing and took it off when I was facilitating experiences. Outcome? This was the second time I’ve tried this approach, and I’m still not sure whether it’s effective/useful or not.
When you pursue risky learning, some things work while some don’t — and for some, the jury is still out. Whatever happens, you can learn something!
Soliciting and being open to observations and feedback
During the workshop:
Some of the questions I asked during body voting asked individuals to come up with a numeric answer, and then join a group line in numerical order. Someone had the bright idea of showing their answer with fingers raised above their head, so it was easy for others to see where to go in the line. Many participants copied the idea, which sped up forming the human spectrograms. I’d never seen this done before and will adopt this simple and effective improvement.
I love to use a geographic two-dimensional human spectrogram to allow participants to quickly discover others who live/work near them. The wide U.S. map I projected did not correspond to the skinny width of the room. A participant suggested that we rotate where we stood by 90º. I tried her suggestion and found that it was easy for people to move to their correct positions. Duly noted!
At the end of the workshop, I solicited public feedback at a group spective. One participant shared frustration with my verbal statements of the body voting questions and suggested that the questions also be projected simultaneously. An excellent refinement that I will incorporate in the future.
Notice how participants were able to point out deficiencies in processes I used and simultaneously came up with some fine solutions. Peer learning in action!
Final thoughts
I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings for 33 years, and many participants have been kind enough to share that I’m good at what I do (check out the sidebar testimonials).
But I don’t want to rest on my laurels. I’m no Casals, but, like him, I keep practicing, learning, and — hopefully — making progress.
My mentor Jerry Weinberg, consultant extraordinaire, wrote an excellent list of reasons to leave a job.
How can we build connection and engagement with the people with whom we work?
Friends don’t let friends give away their original content to third-party platforms
Presenter contracts can be strange. 